


Transmission

by TheDameintheRaininMaine



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Boredom, F/F, F/M, Gen, adjustment, day to day life, diaries, what you say when you don't know if someone can hear
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-28 11:53:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11417406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDameintheRaininMaine/pseuds/TheDameintheRaininMaine
Summary: Clarke sends them messages every day. They can hear them. Sometimes they send them back, knowing she probably can't.





	Transmission

They’re all a little giddy from oxygen deprivation when Clarke’s first transfer comes in. 

“It’s the end of day one after Priamfaya, and I’m still alive”. 

Bellamy’s the one by the radio when it comes through, and he yells out for the rest. 

“Are the comms working?” he asks.

“No, “ Raven replies gravely. “I looked at them, Monty did too. We can receive, but we can’t transmit”. 

“So we can’t even tell her we made it?” Harper says. 

“Or that we know she did either,” Bellamy replies. 

“Is there anything we can do?” Raven says. 

No one responds. 

It’s later in the night when Bellamy picks up the transmitter. 

“Hey Clarke….we made it too. We’re up here, we’re all okay”. 

He puts it down, and walks away, not sure why he did it at all. 

Her calls come through every day. Every day they all stop and listen. 

About four days later, Raven decides to talk back again too. 

“It’s freezing up here. I guess I forgot about how cold the recycled air was. Echo’s the only one who doesn’t seem to mind it. Everyone else has dug up every blanket we can find.”

She pauses. Part of her doesn’t understand why she’s doing thing, talking into a microphone to a friend she knows can’t hear her. 

“Monty and I have tried repeatedly to fix the comms, so that you could hear us respond. It’s already getting lonely up here. We can’t get through to the bunker either. I guess what I’m saying is, it’s nice to know you’re still down there”. 

She puts down the transmitter and walks away. 

Murphy’s the next, to everyone’s surprise, not least of all his own. 

“I forgot how much this place sucked. Give me sleeping in the dirt to sleeping on the metal floor any day. Emori seems to kind of like it though, she dragged our pile of blankets over by the observation deck so she could watch the moonrise at night. Never really thought about that as something special.

MREs still suck, but at least there’s enough of them. Monty’s been fighting with the algae farm day and night. His hands are still pretty bad, and he won’t say how badly it bothers him. Also he keeps frisking our food trying to find something he could try to grow. What I’d give for a mutant deer right now….though I can’t imagine your faring much better than us”. 

He mentions to Emori what he did, and she follows up. 

“I don’t know how you all can sleep up here. It’s so- bright and there’s this hum no one seems to be able to hear but me. I still haven’t figured out how to remember what time of day it is. Can you still see the stars? I hope the death wave didn’t wreck the place too much”.

It’s a few weeks when they get the first transmission that really shocks them. 

“We were right, the nightblood works.” it starts out. Everyone’s sitting around staring, and Harper gasps and cover her mouth. 

“Oh god, if only we could have….” Raven starts. Bellamy shakes his head. 

“We did what we could”. 

“I found her yesterday. Says her name is Madi, but I can’t get anything else out of her- what clan she’s from, what happened to everyone else. I don’t think she’s even five years old. “

“She would have been too young to be trained for the last conclave”. Echo realizes. 

“If she’s found one kid, there could be more. God that must be terrible- she probably lost her whole family”, Harper says. 

Harper’s comment sticks in Bellamy’s head, and he spends the next hour talking back to Clarke, lecturing her on how hard caring for a young child is. 

“I know you can’t hear me- but she’s going to depend on you, look up to you. One day that might not be true, but for now...be there for her.”

None of them really talk about the transmissions they make back, but they all know they happen. Talking about it feels personal, as though Clarke has become their own personal diary keeper. 

Clarke’s next few transmissions are about how she has to struggle to teach Madi some English, because her Trig still isn’t the best. 

Bellamy tells Echo later that she should try and teach them,   
“It’s bad enough our people and everyone else’s are down in the bunker together with such a huge barrier, we shouldn’t have it here too.”

“I’m not plotting to kill you all, and I doubt Emori would help me in any way.”

“I wasn’t accusing you, but you have to admit, things would go smoother if we could always understand each other”. 

There’s more transmissions between these, day to day recitations. The rhythm of the strange, quiet life that develops aboard the ring. 

A few months later, Monty sends the first message he has with any sort of pride in it. 

“So, I managed to get something to sprout in the hydroponics chamber. Raven got a MRE last week that had a piece of raw potato in it. Someone was asleep at the wheel in packaging I guess. But I stuck it in, couldn’t even tell if it had an eye, and today, paydirt!”

He claps his hands together and raises one as if for a high five. He stills midair, then awkwardly lowers his hand. 

He coughs. 

“We went through all the lockers the other day. Raven figured out how to access the media servers on the third day back, but apparently someone in medical was kind of a Luddite. Whole stack of paperbacks in one below someone’s labcoat. Harper’s been completely absorbed in one since she found it, keeps reading sections aloud. It’s about rabbits”. 

Harper tells Clarke a little bit about the rabbits. 

“They’re like people really. They get to this one warren, and the rabbits are all fat and act strange and it turns out they’ve accepted their death by snare….it reminded me of Mount Weather.”

She shuts her eyes. 

“I rolled off our cot last night and woke up face down on the metal grate. I started to panic, because suddenly I was back in that cage. Monty tried to make me feel better, but I didn’t want to tell him. He was there too, and I shouldn’t shove my burdens off on him. He’s always been so private, he doesn’t even talk about…” she still can’t say Jasper “at all.”

Harper isn’t the only one haunted by memories of the mountain. 

“I have to keep telling myself that just because everything here is metal doesn’t mean it’s a cage” Echo says one day, “Even if the ways aboard this, thing, are beyond alien to me doesn’t mean that you were all just like the Mountain Men.”

The latter part of her comment had been the rather uncomfortable discovery that her and Emori were the only ones aboard who menstruated regularly. She hadn’t had any idea what to make of the matter reclaimers Raven had shown her in the heads, though the makeshift cloth rags were more familiar. 

As the first year continues, Clarke’s transmissions cover her foraging across the few sparse areas of green left, and more and more end up being about Madi.

“I didn’t know what to do with her at first” she confesses, “But it’s just the two of us. She depends on me, and looks at me like I know what I’m doing, but she doesn’t….she depends on me, follows me, but she doesn’t have expectations from me. This whole world is a new challenge for the both of us.”

It’s Murphy who responds later with “Must be nice, even if you’re kind of a parent, not having to parent an entire population for once.”

“Monty’s potatoes sprouted out in time for Christmas,” Raven tells her one day. “We boiled and mashed them and mixed in whatever was left in some of the MREs and ate them with the algae. It was almost like a feast. Then Bellamy found some weird movie on the servers about Santa and martians. Do you even know what time of year it is now?”

Bellamy’s Christmas message is grouchily bemoaning the lack of cooking oil leading to the loss of the possibility of recreating the french fry. 

Emori is the one, who doesn’t take as well to the stillness of life aboard. 

“I keep feeling like I should be moving. Truthfully, without the maintenance, there’s not much to do up here. We check things, and fix what needs fixing, and eat and watch stuff on the servers. I’ve never stayed in one place this long. That’s actually why I make Murphy stay by the observation deck with me. It’s the closest thing we have to a new site. Raven keeps staring at the space suits, but she says we don’t have enough supplemental oxygen to do a space walk. I wish we did, I’d kill to be able to float like she did.”

On a particularly bad day, Bellamy asks her, 

“You would tell us if you had managed to contact the bunker right? I know I told myself that Octavia’s life is her own….but I miss her dammit. We were the Ark’s only siblings, but we’ve never been apart this long. We’re all getting along up here, but it’s not the same. Murphy and Emori and Monty and Harper have each other, and Raven mostly keeps to herself and Echo doesn’t seem to know what to make of us...some days I wonder if we’re going to drive each other crazy.”

They’ve been in space a year.

Bellamy’s last transmission talks about finding a picture of the medical crew in the bay, 

“I would send it to you if I could, you must miss your mom”. 

Murphy’s is bemoaning his boredom. 

“I’ve started reading some of the medical books for fun. Fun! And it’s not easy to read them either, even if I was a good reader.”

Echo quietly thanks her, 

“I would have never had any place at all if it weren’t for all of you. As strange as this place is, you all are almost a new clan”, 

Monty asks about the Earth, 

“Is there anything left? Lakes and rivers, mountains….I know you have to focus on your own survival, but would we even recognize what we come back to?”

Harper has finished Watership Down, and is starting on Solaris.

“It’s much stranger. I wish you could hear these messages. There’s nothing to fight up here, so telling these stories seems to be what I can do for us.”

Emori admits, 

“I’ve always lived my life protecting only myself. Adding John to that was strange enough….but I can say now I would protect anyone up here if I could, to my last breath.”

The very last transmission comes from Raven. 

“Are you lonely? I know you have Madi, but she’s just a kid. I’m up here with everyone, and sometimes I still feel completely alone. You would think I’d know how to be lonely by now, but it still sucks.”

The first year comes to a close.


End file.
